Why on earth is that good? All that means is that the newer kernels have code to rewrite and/or interpret old binaries. I don't want a kernel that can run ten types of binaries (only one of which I actually use), I want a kernel that can run one or two types of binaries. Well. Why? Cause I can recompile everything, of course.
Now, this is not the case in Windows, since everybody and his megabucks corporation sees 'release source' as 'OHMYGODTHEHACKERSWILLDOSOMETHINGBAD', so... sux to be them!
I am 15 years old, and have played violent video games for a considerable time (not that long, maybe since I was 13;) I will NOT watch violent movies, and even can't watch the sicko-horror scenes in Monty Python (which I on the whole love, if they'd can the damn animations and b/g/g). I am in NO way desensitized to violence. I am well aware of the difference between a couple hundred pixels on my screen (and a couple thousand on another, not to mention packets and memory state) and a living human being. Hell, I have a hard time sleeping after reading my WWII books. Believe me, I play Counter-Strike and other 'killing' games at LEAST an hour a day (average, of course), but I don't think I'd even shoot at someone attacking me (thakfully, I've never had the chance to find out). In-game I'm a brutal terrorist, but in the real life I'm a soft fuzzy guy who loves his new kitten. There is a sharp difference there. Perhaps I'm different, but people seem to ignore people like me. Perhaps they should actually research non-killers (that is, people who aren't fscked up in the head to start with).
Except, that I happen to really like Linux. I am totally a Unix fan- I like the philosophy, I like the in-depth feel, I like the interfaces, I like the software, I like damn near everything about it. I do NOT like Windows. I have never used an NT, and probably never will, but my opinion of an OS with no CLI is inclined to be quite low. I use my computer for fun 80% of the time- sometimes, I want to play games- for that, I will suffer Windows 98. But most of the time, I like to be able to control every little aspect of my computer. True, I WON'T, but it's the same idea as having a fast car or big, um, nevermind- perhaps you won't spend all your time driving fast or, uh, nevermind again, but the fact that you CAN is just that much satisfaction. The software available for Linux is grossly in excess of that for Windows- the ONLY thing Windows does that Linux cannot, for me, at this point in time, is play several games. True, Wordperfect and Quattro Pro are more 'refined' than AbiWord and gnumeric, but both are improving- and what is there in Windows equivalent to genius (powerful bignum calculator), gimp, emacs, and a zillion other things? Sure, I could buy something like Mathematica for $X big number, Photoshop and Illustrator for $Y almost as big number, and everything else under the sun for a sum total of $Z tremendously huge number, but I never would. The Power of Linux is what I like.
Oh, and please note that s/Linux/whateverdistroorunixlikeOSyouprefer/; is in effect here- I just happen to use Linux. I have nothing against BSD or even Solaris. At any rate, to close a long rant (and to a troll- I should be ashamed), 'all of the above' is a ridiculous claim that has no bounds. And, of course, in Linux, I can hack up solutions for things I can't do, and expect to some extent help with them from others- the Open Source trade in Windows is pathetically small. If I ever see 'shareware' and 'freeware' again it'll be TOO GODDAMN SOON.
(end unproofread late-night rant)
> We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time -- T.S. Eliot
Are you my freshman English teacher by any chance?;) He said that like five times each class. (A wonderful lecturer, he'd be talking about something and then suddenly you'd realize that he was getting close to returning to his original point... and then suddenly, "We shall not cease from exploration...") I still think that's one of the all-time best quotes. I can't imagine why it's not in the Fortunes file that comes with Slackware. (My RHat box isn't up, not sure if its in its list)
Hush. Some of us don't have time to read through the avalanche at Freshmeat, stable kernel announcements are relatively rare, and useful. If you don't like it, please take use of that wonderful feature someone put on your keyboard: the 'down' arrow.
Although this is not a field of law in which I have any experience, it seems that this is false advertising. The company is claiming something on its advertisement- the box- namely, that their product will function under the GNU/Linux operating system. The product clearly does not do this. The consumer is misled by the advertising. Is this not false advertising? (NO, I'm not a lawyer. I am a legal assistant though, so I pick up a lot about the law. I've just not done anything near this area.)
I don't know as much about PGP encryption as I should, and would want to, but. My PGP passphrase is hellishly long. It's about forty characters. With spaces, capitalization, and several marks of punctuation. Brute-forcing it would take a awfully long time, I'd think.
I got the fax.com thing too. It is absolutely illegal, and violates several VERY SPECIFIC codes. My copy of their spam got thrown out- maybe I'll get another. Do you know of anybody who's fighting them? I want to nail the buggers.
This is absolutely true, and much more deeply so than the zealots might think. I personally enjoy hacking together a myriad of programs to do XYZ on the console, building from sources, and whatnot- but I tried using helix-gnome, and must say that their setup is wonderful. No hassle trying to disentangle RPM dependancies, no config files, no nothing. Just install, and in no time you have a working system. And a good-looking one at that! Many people are not interested in learning bash, vi, emacs, what-have-you; if I plopped my little brother down in front of this he'd love it because of the pretty colors and the overall feeling of wholeness and attractiveness. This idea of 'good looking' is sorely missing in a lot of OSS stuff. I personally don't *need* it, but that doesn't mean I don't *like* it. I switched back to GNOME while upgrading KDE a while ago... and what the hell, I just can't go back to KDE's spartan feel. Just my two bytes.
I've been quietly reading through this whole thread, but this post really seems strange. I have a hard time seeing how the Start Wars parody could POSSIBLY be any low point at ALL in the strip. I read the static daily, and am still waiting for him to do another thing like the SW parody.:)
I'm sorry, when you say "I come here to bury OS/2 not praise it" you are morally obliged to praise it. It's called whatchamacallit. There's a word, something fancy. The passive periphrastic. No, that's not it, it just sounds good. Anyways, the idea is you say you're gonna say something and then say the opposite. I'm too tired. I onlypost tired, and I can't type tired. Go figger
Disclaimer: The above made absolutely no sense. Please moderate this to oblivion.
Who can't run the executable unzipper anyways? If I download files that end in EXE, my first reaction is "file $file" followed by "unzip $file" or whatever. I would never have known about the license agreement in the first place, and as I could not read it anyways (well, not true, I could pull the strings out, but whatever) how could I 'circumvent' it. Or are MS Windoze users only allowed to download it?
I bet one reason is the sheer amount of traffic. I don't know much about netnews/NNTP, but it seems that the insane amount of traffic would be a big issue. Also, how would you handle the hierarchy that/. already has- articles, polls, etc? You'd have to do some interesting things in the header or something along those lines. It seems to be a lost cause to me.
Bravo, bravo! Please! It's not even close! Everybody knows that TRIUMVIRATE comes from the Latin tres, tres, tria = three plus vir, viri = man. Three men. There were two or three of them, three guys would get together and rule. Not a bad idea, but they sort of got to fighting. Anyways, anybody who could pronounce the word could spell it- tri um vir ate. Latin is EASY to spell! In Hemos' defense, though, it IS late. That's my defense too. If you read this, I'm sorry for wasting your time.
That's a good idea! I'll have to enact such a ban here, too. I wonder if Junkbuster could be pounded into blocking sites that score below X% on a grammar check.:)
Why'd you post as an AC? This has to be one of the single best posts I've ever read. I'm following what you say now. Are there any model letters to congressmen I can find? I'd post mine up for proofreading and other people's use, but it's pretty specific (I play on the fact that I'm a minor).
MP3 files are broken into small frames. Each one is some tiny fraction of a second long, you can find out all the little details, byes, etc somewhere. Anyways, each of these frames is encoded seperately, so playing an MP3 backwards is just an issue of starting at the back, identifying and stripping the ID3 tag (last 128 bytes) and finding each frame in reverse order (remember that with VBR, you can't simply go back 200 bytes or so (I can't remember whether the frame header information goes into the bitrate), I don't know enough about the format to tell you how that is done. I believe there's a length field somewhere) For that matter, I've never seen software that can do that... does such a beast exist?:)
This is most certainly not true, on a moral and (at least in the US, I'm sure in most countries) lgal level. While I am not a parent (in fact,I'm reading this from the 'other side'- I'm a minor myself) when I do become a parent, I will most certainly pay close attention to the habits and activites of my children. I know my parents do. They would set up a system like the monitoring/logging device mentioned earlier (if I discussed it with them... heh heh heh) and not a 'blocking' system. I am, actually, considering the prospect of doing that myself, for the 'benefit' of my little brother. (Ah, sibling wars...;) A censoring program is only a crutch for a parent, to prevent them from doing their job- a logging system does not block 'okay' sites, but a later review of visited sites would turn up whatever a parent wants to block- porn, hate sites, and more- say a child (or minor, whatever age) is reading only one side of an issue- perhaps, from the parents' point of view, the 'wrong' one. They could bring this up, to make sure that their child doesn't get the 'wrong' idea. This is, by the way, their right too. It also would allow them to see questionable things-- for instance, information on building dangerous devices (heh heh heh) might uncover a 'basement experiment' or six. (*innocent look*) Best of all, the parents are free to deal with it however they want- from a warning to grounding, removal of internet access, etc. True, some parets couldn't handle this responsibiity () but many could. The child might not like it-- persons of my age tend to want to be able to do everything an adult can-- but the parents should be able to have some control over their children's upbringing. The choice remains in their hands, and trying to take it away (you can't do this, you can't do that, you can't hit your child, whatever-- sometimes I think a judicous smack or two would help me) only leads to worse and worse children. () Anyways, I AM still just a (relatively) little kid, so take my opinions with a grain of sand, or whatever.:)
I disagree with this. The high school I go to, Loyola High School of Los Angeles, is not mainly composed of priests and religious, but does have quite a few. And they're Jesuits. And they don't hire preppy teachers (many of them, anyways) Anyways, there isn't much or any harassment or bullying aside from the normal amount of good-natured hazing of the frosh. I am a member of that lowly group, BTW.:) The student body is large and diverse enough that just about everybody has at least a few people who are like them, and with whom they can form a lunch discussion group, club, or whatever. The computer club, which recently got an office (in which we read our mail, chat, fight, play games, etc) is composed of about six guys interested in computers in various ways. We are not generally asocial, but discuss stuff of various technical depth (from Big G's keynote at Comdex to the club president's dislike of USB's low power level) and have links to many other Loyola groups, including the paper, the yearbook, the drama and music groups, etc. I think we're doing fine getting young geeks like ourselves into the world... perhaps this is an answer? Sorry for the rambling post, I'm drunk tonight.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. This process of growth is the same thing that makes just about everything work- for example, I am currently a 'frosh' in high school. True, a lot of the frosh are stupid, annoying, and clueless, but some aren't. The population will grow, and balance- in four years, the frosh will become the allmighty seniors. The same thing happens in this community- ACs learn about getting a name, learn a bit, and become productive members of the group.
As far as egos go- if you remember, one of the prime reasons Open Source works is 'egoboo'. Without some big egos churning out good code, we're sunk. Thank god that human nature is pretty constant.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth is that good? All that means is that the newer kernels have code to rewrite and/or interpret old binaries. I don't want a kernel that can run ten types of binaries (only one of which I actually use), I want a kernel that can run one or two types of binaries. Well. Why? Cause I can recompile everything, of course.
Now, this is not the case in Windows, since everybody and his megabucks corporation sees 'release source' as 'OHMYGODTHEHACKERSWILLDOSOMETHINGBAD', so... sux to be them!
This is the most well-thought-out, well-written post I've seen on slashdot in a long time. Thank you very much.
I am 15 years old, and have played violent video games for a considerable time (not that long, maybe since I was 13 ;) I will NOT watch violent movies, and even can't watch the sicko-horror scenes in Monty Python (which I on the whole love, if they'd can the damn animations and b/g/g). I am in NO way desensitized to violence. I am well aware of the difference between a couple hundred pixels on my screen (and a couple thousand on another, not to mention packets and memory state) and a living human being. Hell, I have a hard time sleeping after reading my WWII books. Believe me, I play Counter-Strike and other 'killing' games at LEAST an hour a day (average, of course), but I don't think I'd even shoot at someone attacking me (thakfully, I've never had the chance to find out). In-game I'm a brutal terrorist, but in the real life I'm a soft fuzzy guy who loves his new kitten. There is a sharp difference there. Perhaps I'm different, but people seem to ignore people like me. Perhaps they should actually research non-killers (that is, people who aren't fscked up in the head to start with).
Except, that I happen to really like Linux. I am totally a Unix fan- I like the philosophy, I like the in-depth feel, I like the interfaces, I like the software, I like damn near everything about it. I do NOT like Windows. I have never used an NT, and probably never will, but my opinion of an OS with no CLI is inclined to be quite low. I use my computer for fun 80% of the time- sometimes, I want to play games- for that, I will suffer Windows 98. But most of the time, I like to be able to control every little aspect of my computer. True, I WON'T, but it's the same idea as having a fast car or big, um, nevermind- perhaps you won't spend all your time driving fast or, uh, nevermind again, but the fact that you CAN is just that much satisfaction. The software available for Linux is grossly in excess of that for Windows- the ONLY thing Windows does that Linux cannot, for me, at this point in time, is play several games. True, Wordperfect and Quattro Pro are more 'refined' than AbiWord and gnumeric, but both are improving- and what is there in Windows equivalent to genius (powerful bignum calculator), gimp, emacs, and a zillion other things? Sure, I could buy something like Mathematica for $X big number, Photoshop and Illustrator for $Y almost as big number, and everything else under the sun for a sum total of $Z tremendously huge number, but I never would. The Power of Linux is what I like.
Oh, and please note that s/Linux/whateverdistroorunixlikeOSyouprefer/; is in effect here- I just happen to use Linux. I have nothing against BSD or even Solaris. At any rate, to close a long rant (and to a troll- I should be ashamed), 'all of the above' is a ridiculous claim that has no bounds. And, of course, in Linux, I can hack up solutions for things I can't do, and expect to some extent help with them from others- the Open Source trade in Windows is pathetically small. If I ever see 'shareware' and 'freeware' again it'll be TOO GODDAMN SOON.
(end unproofread late-night rant)
> We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time -- T.S. Eliot
;) He said that like five times each class. (A wonderful lecturer, he'd be talking about something and then suddenly you'd realize that he was getting close to returning to his original point... and then suddenly, "We shall not cease from exploration...") I still think that's one of the all-time best quotes. I can't imagine why it's not in the Fortunes file that comes with Slackware. (My RHat box isn't up, not sure if its in its list)
Are you my freshman English teacher by any chance?
Hush. Some of us don't have time to read through the avalanche at Freshmeat, stable kernel announcements are relatively rare, and useful. If you don't like it, please take use of that wonderful feature someone put on your keyboard: the 'down' arrow.
Although this is not a field of law in which I have any experience, it seems that this is false advertising. The company is claiming something on its advertisement- the box- namely, that their product will function under the GNU/Linux operating system. The product clearly does not do this. The consumer is misled by the advertising. Is this not false advertising? (NO, I'm not a lawyer. I am a legal assistant though, so I pick up a lot about the law. I've just not done anything near this area.)
I don't know as much about PGP encryption as I should, and would want to, but. My PGP passphrase is hellishly long. It's about forty characters. With spaces, capitalization, and several marks of punctuation. Brute-forcing it would take a awfully long time, I'd think.
I got the fax.com thing too. It is absolutely illegal, and violates several VERY SPECIFIC codes. My copy of their spam got thrown out- maybe I'll get another. Do you know of anybody who's fighting them? I want to nail the buggers.
Why can't people ever read the gawl darn articles? This thing is for gravity _only_, more or less.
Well, I must admit that I never did go to the page- I don't run Kerberos, nor NT, so it doesn't affect me. :)
This is absolutely true, and much more deeply so than the zealots might think. I personally enjoy hacking together a myriad of programs to do XYZ on the console, building from sources, and whatnot- but I tried using helix-gnome, and must say that their setup is wonderful. No hassle trying to disentangle RPM dependancies, no config files, no nothing. Just install, and in no time you have a working system. And a good-looking one at that! Many people are not interested in learning bash, vi, emacs, what-have-you; if I plopped my little brother down in front of this he'd love it because of the pretty colors and the overall feeling of wholeness and attractiveness. This idea of 'good looking' is sorely missing in a lot of OSS stuff. I personally don't *need* it, but that doesn't mean I don't *like* it. I switched back to GNOME while upgrading KDE a while ago... and what the hell, I just can't go back to KDE's spartan feel. Just my two bytes.
I've been quietly reading through this whole thread, but this post really seems strange. I have a hard time seeing how the Start Wars parody could POSSIBLY be any low point at ALL in the strip. I read the static daily, and am still waiting for him to do another thing like the SW parody. :)
I'm sorry, when you say "I come here to bury OS/2 not praise it" you are morally obliged to praise it. It's called whatchamacallit. There's a word, something fancy. The passive periphrastic. No, that's not it, it just sounds good. Anyways, the idea is you say you're gonna say something and then say the opposite. I'm too tired. I onlypost tired, and I can't type tired. Go figger
Disclaimer: The above made absolutely no sense. Please moderate this to oblivion.
Who can't run the executable unzipper anyways? If I download files that end in EXE, my first reaction is "file $file" followed by "unzip $file" or whatever. I would never have known about the license agreement in the first place, and as I could not read it anyways (well, not true, I could pull the strings out, but whatever) how could I 'circumvent' it. Or are MS Windoze users only allowed to download it?
:)
Of course, I'm a minor too, sooooo...
I bet one reason is the sheer amount of traffic. I don't know much about netnews/NNTP, but it seems that the insane amount of traffic would be a big issue. Also, how would you handle the hierarchy that /. already has- articles, polls, etc? You'd have to do some interesting things in the header or something along those lines. It seems to be a lost cause to me.
Betcha ten to one that tomorrow it'll be "APRIL FOOLS!" :) Remember, lots of sites did it last year- UF and FM come to mind.
Bravo, bravo! Please! It's not even close! Everybody knows that TRIUMVIRATE comes from the Latin tres, tres, tria = three plus vir, viri = man. Three men. There were two or three of them, three guys would get together and rule. Not a bad idea, but they sort of got to fighting. Anyways, anybody who could pronounce the word could spell it- tri um vir ate. Latin is EASY to spell! In Hemos' defense, though, it IS late. That's my defense too. If you read this, I'm sorry for wasting your time.
That's a good idea! I'll have to enact such a ban here, too. I wonder if Junkbuster could be pounded into blocking sites that score below X% on a grammar check. :)
Why'd you post as an AC? This has to be one of the single best posts I've ever read. I'm following what you say now. Are there any model letters to congressmen I can find? I'd post mine up for proofreading and other people's use, but it's pretty specific (I play on the fact that I'm a minor).
MP3 files are broken into small frames. Each one is some tiny fraction of a second long, you can find out all the little details, byes, etc somewhere. Anyways, each of these frames is encoded seperately, so playing an MP3 backwards is just an issue of starting at the back, identifying and stripping the ID3 tag (last 128 bytes) and finding each frame in reverse order (remember that with VBR, you can't simply go back 200 bytes or so (I can't remember whether the frame header information goes into the bitrate), I don't know enough about the format to tell you how that is done. I believe there's a length field somewhere) For that matter, I've never seen software that can do that... does such a beast exist? :)
This is most certainly not true, on a moral and (at least in the US, I'm sure in most countries) lgal level. While I am not a parent (in fact,I'm reading this from the 'other side'- I'm a minor myself) when I do become a parent, I will most certainly pay close attention to the habits and activites of my children. I know my parents do. They would set up a system like the monitoring/logging device mentioned earlier (if I discussed it with them... heh heh heh) and not a 'blocking' system. I am, actually, considering the prospect of doing that myself, for the 'benefit' of my little brother. (Ah, sibling wars... ;) A censoring program is only a crutch for a parent, to prevent them from doing their job- a logging system does not block 'okay' sites, but a later review of visited sites would turn up whatever a parent wants to block- porn, hate sites, and more- say a child (or minor, whatever age) is reading only one side of an issue- perhaps, from the parents' point of view, the 'wrong' one. They could bring this up, to make sure that their child doesn't get the 'wrong' idea. This is, by the way, their right too. It also would allow them to see questionable things-- for instance, information on building dangerous devices (heh heh heh) might uncover a 'basement experiment' or six. (*innocent look*) Best of all, the parents are free to deal with it however they want- from a warning to grounding, removal of internet access, etc. True, some parets couldn't handle this responsibiity () but many could. The child might not like it-- persons of my age tend to want to be able to do everything an adult can-- but the parents should be able to have some control over their children's upbringing. The choice remains in their hands, and trying to take it away (you can't do this, you can't do that, you can't hit your child, whatever-- sometimes I think a judicous smack or two would help me) only leads to worse and worse children. () Anyways, I AM still just a (relatively) little kid, so take my opinions with a grain of sand, or whatever. :)
I disagree with this. The high school I go to, Loyola High School of Los Angeles, is not mainly composed of priests and religious, but does have quite a few. And they're Jesuits. And they don't hire preppy teachers (many of them, anyways) Anyways, there isn't much or any harassment or bullying aside from the normal amount of good-natured hazing of the frosh. I am a member of that lowly group, BTW. :) The student body is large and diverse enough that just about everybody has at least a few people who are like them, and with whom they can form a lunch discussion group, club, or whatever. The computer club, which recently got an office (in which we read our mail, chat, fight, play games, etc) is composed of about six guys interested in computers in various ways. We are not generally asocial, but discuss stuff of various technical depth (from Big G's keynote at Comdex to the club president's dislike of USB's low power level) and have links to many other Loyola groups, including the paper, the yearbook, the drama and music groups, etc. I think we're doing fine getting young geeks like ourselves into the world... perhaps this is an answer? Sorry for the rambling post, I'm drunk tonight.
Maybe even incorporate it into UOX, eh? :)
:) Nice to see you've popped up around here. :)
You might remember me as 'CM-Gandalf'
I agree with you wholeheartedly. This process of growth is the same thing that makes just about everything work- for example, I am currently a 'frosh' in high school. True, a lot of the frosh are stupid, annoying, and clueless, but some aren't. The population will grow, and balance- in four years, the frosh will become the allmighty seniors. The same thing happens in this community- ACs learn about getting a name, learn a bit, and become productive members of the group.
:)
As far as egos go- if you remember, one of the prime reasons Open Source works is 'egoboo'. Without some big egos churning out good code, we're sunk. Thank god that human nature is pretty constant.